scholarly journals Exploring the political pulse of a country using data science tools

Author(s):  
Miguel G. Folgado ◽  
Veronica Sanz

AbstractIn this paper we illustrate the use of Data Science techniques to analyse complex human communication. In particular, we consider tweets from leaders of political parties as a dynamical proxy to political programmes and ideas. We also study the temporal evolution of their contents as a reaction to specific events. We analyse levels of positive and negative sentiment in the tweets using new tools adapted to social media. We also train a Fully-Connected Neural Network (FCNN) to recognise the political affiliation of a tweet. The FCNN is able to predict the origin of the tweet with a precision in the range of 71–75%, and the political leaning (left or right) with a precision of around 90%. This study is meant to be viewed as an example of how to use Twitter data and different types of Data Science tools for a political analysis.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Folgado ◽  
Veronica Sanz

In this paper we illustrate the use of Data Science techniques to analyse complex human communication. In particular, we consider tweets from leaders of political parties as a dynamical proxy to political programmes and ideas. We also study the temporal evolution of their contents as a reaction to specific events. We analyse levels of positive and negative sentiment in the tweets using new tools adapted to social media. We also train an Artificial Intelligence to recognise the political affiliation of a tweet. The AI is able to predict the origin of the tweet with a precision in the range of 71-75%, and the political leaning (left or right) with a precision of around 90%. This study is meant to be viewed as a proof-of-concept of interdisciplinary nature, at the interface between Data Science and political analysis.


Author(s):  
Özgür Erden

This article embarks on making a political analysis of Islamist politics by criticizing the hegemonic approach in the field and considering a number of the institutions or structures, composing of either state and its ideological-repressive apparatuses, political parties and actors, intellectual leadership and ideology, and political relations, events, or facts in political sphere. The aforesaid approach declares that the social and economic factors, namely class position, capital accumulation, market, education, and culture, have been far better significative for a political study in examining any political movement, party, and fact or event. However, our study will more stress on political structures, events and struggles or conflicts produced and reproduced by the political institutions, the relationships and the processes in question. Taking into account all these, it will be argued that they have been more significant as compared to class position, capital accumulation, market in economic structure, or culture and education, in a political study.


Res Publica ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Marc Swyngedouw ◽  
Jaak Billiet

Taking into account the limits of such data, this study analyses the shifts in voting behaviour from the national elections in 1985 to those in 1987 in Flanders, using log-linear modelling. The use of data from poll surveys for estimating shifts between subsequent elections poses some methodological problems.The second part presents the results of the analysis. About 13,51 % of -the 1985-voters switched. Although there are significant shifts between all the political parties, the Christian Democratic Party (CVP) loses on all fronts. A log-linear analysis of party-reference by sex, age and occupational status shows the strength and weakness of each party in different societal categories. In conclusion, an interpretation of the shifts is proposed. The following factors can account for the major shifts : the desintegration of the catholic pillar, the emergence of a dual society, the affinity between neo-liberalism and yuppie-culture and the conflict between the language communities.


2012 ◽  
pp. 1018-1034
Author(s):  
Fabian Ströhle ◽  
Timm Sprenger

The rise of Twitter has changed human communication behavior not only in the political domain, but also in many other fields. Individuals are increasingly using microblogging platforms like Twitter for political deliberation, making full use of the features offered for discussions and social networking. At the same time, politicians and political parties hop on the bandwagon, using Twitter to reach a larger audience and communicate to constituents. As is the case for blogs, the political Twittersphere is fragmented along party lines, but stimulates communication between different ideological clusters. The publicly available discussions on Twitter can serve as a basis for election forecasts and have the potential to complement opinion polls and prediction markets in the future.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER W. WIELHOUWER

This research examines the role of the personal contacting activities of the political parties as mobilizing forces in what Verba and Nie termed campaign activities. A reformulated rational choice model is discussed in which parties seek to reduce certain avoidable and unavoidable costs associated with political participation. Using data from the 1952 through 1994 American National Election Studies, it is shown that the party contact has been and continues to be a major factor in mobilizing campaign activists. Its influence is remarkably robust, maintaining statistical and substantive significance even after controlling for other important factors usually associated with political behavior.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Michael M Ndonye

This paper critiques ethnopolitical journalism in televised political analyses of the 2017 electoral process in Kenya. Ethnopolitical journalism is a reporting model characterised by a focus on ethnicity when analysing and describing political situations; leading to ethnic identity formation in the society that places mass media at economic vantage point. Motivated by mediatized ethnicity, Kenyans find themselves perpetually under normalised ethnopolitics and ethnopolitical journalism is a major strategy in the mainstream media. Fourteen televised political analysis shows; from major television channels were examined. The analysis targeted prioritised and dominant topics of discussion, the composition of the panels; the most discussed presidential candidates and the moderator’s leads toward a particular direction during the analyses. The findings show that in all the televised political analysis shows, all members of the panel are drawn from the five ethnic groups. Moreover, all priority topics target the two supposedly major political sides (NASA and Jubilee); whose principals and deputies come from the five ethnic groups. It was also noted that every discussion from different Television channels are narrowed deliberately by the moderator to discuss about Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta, thus, ignoring all other presidential candidates, their political parties and areas considered their strongholds. These findings reveal the media’s deliberate choices of house styles and reporting models during the electoral periods in Kenya. The study concludes that media has been the high priest of ethnicity normalization culture that has shaped the political mindset of Africa to the extent of undermining its transformative leadership. The findings add to the research critical of media practice and political economy of mass media reporting during electioneering periods.


Author(s):  
Bogdan Ferens

The article is devoted to the issue of political space forming of contemporary Ukraine and European Union. The paper proposes a new classification of the political parties which are represented in Ukraine. It was determined by using different types of analysis the concept of “policy space” and its application in contemporary political science, main trends and relationships that directly affect the integration of Ukraine’s political system into the EU political space, importance of inter-party cooperation in the process of European integration.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis Andreadis ◽  
Heiko Giebler

AbstractLocating political parties correctly regarding different policy issues is not just crucial for research on parties, party competition, and many similar fields but also for the electorate. For the latter, it has become more and more important as the relevance of voting advice applications (VAA) has increased and as their main usage is to compare citizens’ policy preferences to the offer of political parties. However, if party positions are not adequately assigned, citizens are provided with suboptimal information which decreases the citizens’ capacities to make rational electoral decision. VAA designers follow different approaches to determining party positions. In this paper, we look beyond most common sources like electoral manifestos and expert judgments by using surveys of electoral candidates to validate and improve VAAs. We argue that by using positions derived from candidate surveys we get the information by the source itself, but at the same time we overcome most of the disadvantages of the other methods. Using data for the 2014 European Parliament election both in Greece and Germany, we show that while positions taken from the VAAs and from the candidate surveys do match more often than not, we also find substantive differences and even opposing positions. Moreover, these occasional differences have already rather severe consequences looking at calculated overlaps between citizens and parties as well as representations of the political competition space and party system polarization. These differences seem to be more pronounced in Greece. We conclude that candidate surveys are indeed a valid additional source to validate and improve VAAs.


2019 ◽  
pp. 983-1004
Author(s):  
Alem Maksuti ◽  
Tomaž Deželan

The daily interaction between political parties and voters is a driving force in election campaigns and can influence their outcomes. The theory of campaign intensity holds that the timing of message delivery in an election campaign is a key component of the strategies used by political actors. However, this theory also warns political actors to be cautious about the timing of different types of messages sent during the election campaign. Our objective is to examine the intensity and types of messages Slovenian political actors communicated through Twitter during different stages in the 2014 national election campaign. Our study conducts a content analysis of 7,113 tweets posted during the last four weeks of the official election campaign. It includes 17 official accounts of Slovenian parties, party leaders, and influential party twitterians. The results indicated that the stage of the campaign and the differences between established and fringe political parties significantly influenced the intensity of Twitter communications during the study period. The results also revealed that the political actors tweeted different types of political messages (e.g., to inform and to persuade voters) during different stages of the campaign.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-509
Author(s):  
Su-Hyun Lee

Why do some declining industries receive more compensation through protectionist policies than others, even without actively engaging in lobbying? How does the political representation of industries affect their chances for protectionist relief? This paper argues that political parties seek to optimize electoral returns through the strategic allocation of distributive benefits generated by trade barriers. The inter-industry structure of protection is thus explained by the interaction between industries’ trade preferences and political characteristics. Using data on protection and subnational employment for US industries and district-level election outcomes in the 1990s, this paper finds that the concentration of industries in competitive constituencies not only increases their chances of receiving higher tariffs, but also magnifies the marginal effect of comparative disadvantage on tariff and nontariff protection.


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